Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Monday July 21, 2008 @06:18PM
from the sky-is-falling dept.

chareverie writes "Fortify Software released a study where they concluded that open source software poses a large security risk to corporations who have implemented it. They reason this by stating that the fault lies within the open source communities and their failure to adhere to minimum security practices. Fortify Software studied 11 open source software packages, where the application server Tomcat was determined to be the best. The other 10 were found to have poor results, with those being Derby, Geronimo, Hibernate, Hipergate, JBoss, Jonas, OFBiz, OpenCMS, Resin and Struts. Jacob West, manager of Fortify's research group, reminds that purpose of the study was 'not to condemn open source software, but rather to point out that the security practices need to improve because open source adoption by enterprises and governments is growing.'"

While we use tomcat, thankfully we don't use any of the others (in fact, I haven't even heard of several of them). As an example, we use Alfresco as our cms. If it ever caused security concerns, we could switch to a different open source cms. This would probably be quite a bit tougher if you were stuck with a single closed source package (and good luck finding out which "minimum security practices" a closed source vendor uses).

Check out some of the things that they're rating it on, too. A lot of their complaints and ratings come from communication and support issues, where most open source software fails. That's why there's a service industry being built up around open source software. You'll also notice that they didn't rate any software that has a big company behind it, like RHEL or MySQL or anything like that.

That being said, these are valid complaints, and if external support is going to be an issue with your company, then you need to think very carefully about whether open source software is right for you.

JBoss is not widely used. Struts is, Hibernate mostly is... However, the underlying problem is that these are ALL middleware packages. Is the study claiming that the middleware is faulty? Or that the apps other people write on top of that middleware has issues? If it's the apps, then the middleware is likely blameless. Even if it is the middleware, why isn't the app filtering out erronious inputs? And why is the middleware being run in a container with excessive permissions?

This study manages to tell me one thing: This group has no idea how to perform studies. Even most FUD merchants would do a bit better job of covering the deficiencies in their methods.

This study doesn't show OSS is a risk at all. They forgot to compare it with proprietary software. Without such a comparison you can't tell wether OSS is worse. For all I know 10 out of 11 proprietary software packages would have issues too.

Studies also conclude that lunixes is a big intellectual IP property ripoff doomed to failure, laptops will completely replace desktops in ten years, and piracy is a really big problem that's sending business after business into bankruptcy.

It's wonderful how you can release any anecdotal evidence from a limited perspective as a marketable 'study'.

I'm releasing a study on how interest groups posing as reputable and productive companies pass bullshit around like the flu.

No, if anything, these packages aren't unrelated enough to get a good cross section of FOSS. They're mostly web app-related thingys that are tied into Java. I haven't heard of most of them, probably because I stay strictly away from Java.

I got that impression too. Have you ever tried calling Microsoft support? By the time you actually get a qualified person to answer your question, you could have received 2 - 3 responses on a OSS project's forum or mailing list.

Another interesting thing that I saw the study fail to mention, there are many OSS projects that clearly state on their web site "This is not yet production quality, use at your own risk".. yet anyone selling something new would not dare to issue such a warning.

I really feel like the study is rampant FUD that hopes to be viral so that the authors can place themselves in some sort of authoritative role.